City of Women
David R. Gillham, 2012
Amy Einhorn/Putnam
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399157769
Summary
Who do you trust, who do you love, and who can be saved?
It is 1943—the height of the Second World War—and Berlin has essentially become a city of women. Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover, now lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is a Jew.
But Sigrid is not the only one with secrets.
A high ranking SS officer and his family move down the hall and Sigrid finds herself pulled into their orbit. A young woman doing her duty-year is out of excuses before Sigrid can even ask her any questions. And then there’s the blind man selling pencils on the corner, whose eyes Sigrid can feel following her from behind the darkness of his goggles.
Soon Sigrid is embroiled in a world she knew nothing about, and as her eyes open to the reality around her, the carefully constructed fortress of solitude she has built over the years begins to collapse. She must choose to act on what is right and what is wrong, and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two.
In this page-turning novel, David Gillham explores what happens to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times, and how the choices they make can be the difference between life and death. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—
• Where—
• Education—University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Western Massachusetts
David R. Gillham’s writing reflects his lifelong love of history. “My connection to history has always been palpable, especially to certain times and places. When I write about a place like Berlin in the 1940′s, I feel like I am walking around its streets. I feel at home there, at least in my head.
I think I’m especially drawn to dark periods of the past, when people were forced to make choices about whether or not they would live their lives in fear. And in particular, I write about women in the past. We have all read about how men go to war, for instance, but what about the experience of women? What wars have they fought on a daily basis? That is what lead me to begin City of Women with the character of Sigrid—an ordinary woman forced to make an extraordinary choice—and then not only live with the dangerous consequences, but also rise above them.”
Early in Gillham's career, he was trained as a screen writer at University of Southern California, and then moved irrevocably into fiction. After relocating to New York City, he spent over a decade in the book business, and now lives with his family in Western Massachusetts. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) In this stunning debut about the battle between good and evil, Gillham puts a fresh spin on the horrors of WWII by focusing on civilian German women to reveal that, amid the many adherents of the party line there were a handful of unsung heroes.... The line between what is “right” and “wrong” becomes harder to define as Sigrid, confronted with increasingly more horrifying realities, finds her resolve constantly tested. Gillham’s transcendent prose..., powerfully drawn characters, and the multilayered dilemmas make his first literary effort a powerful revelation.
Publishers Weekly
During World War II, a large portion of Germany’s male population were off serving their Führer and Fatherland, leaving behind legions of women to continue alone on the home front.... The complex relationships that develop among women, men, family, and lovers are at the core of what drives this debut novel, which captures both heart and mind from the start and does not let go until the riveting end. Verdict: This is an exemplary model of historical fiction generously laced with romance, suspense, and exciting plot twists. Readers who enjoy the grim side of historical fiction or who prefer romance infused with eroticism will find this novel appealing. —Amy M. Davis, Parmley Billings Lib., MT
Library Journal
(Starred review.) In his debut about 1943 Berlin, Gillham uses elements common to the many previous movies and books about World War II—from vicious Nazis to black marketeers to Jewish children hiding in attics to beautiful blond German women hiding their sexuality inside drab coats—yet manages to make the story fresh.... [With its] hold-your-breath suspense ending, World War II Germany may be familiar ground, but Gillham's novel—vividly cinematic yet subtle and full of moral ambiguity, not to mention riveting characters—is as impossible to put down as it is to forget.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Sigrid helps Ericha at the cinema in the opening of the book? If you had been in Sigrid’s situation, would you have helped Ericha? Would you have become as involved as Sigrid does? With the advantage of hindsight, our perspective is no doubt skewed; since we know the truth behind what was happening in Nazi Germany, how do our answers compare with Sigrid’s bold decisions?
2. As the story progresses, Sigrid grows more and more involved and takes more and more risks. How does her reasoning for doing so later differ from the reasoning behind her first risky decision in the cinema? What is her motivation for making these increasingly dangerous choices? Desire? Excitement? Conscience?
3. Discuss the theme of betrayal in City of Women. Many of the characters are guilty of double-crossing and treachery. In what ways do they deceive one another? What about Egon? Is his betrayal portrayed differently from that of others, such as Renate or Ericha?
4. Sigrid’s relationships are numerous and varied—with her mother-in-law, her neighbors, her coworkers, her husband, her lovers, the so-called U-boats. How does each of them define who Sigrid is? How is she reflected in the various relationships? How have these bonds been altered by the extraordinary circumstances of war?
5. Were you surprised by the depiction of Berlin during World War II? Before reading the novel, had you thought about what life was like on the German home front as the tide turned and defeat loomed on the horizon?
6. Countless times throughout the novel, characters risk their lives to help others—to protect the value of human life, spurred on by their own integrity. Conversely, there is the scene on the bus where no one does anything as a Jewish woman is arrested and brutalized. Which do you think is typical of human behavior? Are people more inclined to avert their eyes and try to stay out of trouble, or risk their own safety and get involved? Why?
7. If one simply observes the facts at surface value, Sigrid would probably not be considered a righteously moral individual. Nonetheless, she manages to be a very sympathetic character. How does the author accomplish this?
8. Sigrid’s coworker Renate seems to have a sensibility similar to hers. Yet when Renate discovers that Sigrid’s lover may be Jewish, her response shocks Sigrid. Was it naive of Sigrid to expect anything different? Were you surprised by how deep-seated Renate’s anti-Semitism was?
9. Often in the novel, people are not actually who they appear to be. Consider Frau Obersturmführer Junger, the SS officer’s pregnant wife who moves in down the hall: were you shocked to find out her secret? Do you feel that everyone in the book is hiding something?
10. How would you characterize Sigrid’s relationship with Ericha Kohl? Antagonistic? Trusting? Maternal? What do you think Sigrid gets from her relationship with Ericha? What does Ericha get from Sigrid?
11. What did you think about Kaspar? Egon? Wolfram? All are on the wrong side of history. Did you find any of them appealing? Are they very different from one another?
12. At one point Sigrid flirts with the idea of turning in Anna Weiss and her two daughters so that she can have Egon to herself. Do you feel she seriously considers this?
13. How important is amorous passion in the novel? Is that the driving force that motivates Sigrid? Is it emblematic of something else?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker, 2012
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812982947
Summary
With a voice as distinctive and original as that of The Lovely Bones, and for the fans of the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles is a luminous, haunting, and unforgettable debut novel about coming of age set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.
It still amazes me how little we really knew.... Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray.
Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—San Diego, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
Karen Thompson Walker was born and raised in San Diego, California. She is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. In 2011 she received Sirenland Fellowship, as well as a Bomb magazine fiction prize.
A former editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work. Her debut was published in 2012. Her second novel, The Dreamers came out in 2019.
Walker lives with her husband, the novelist Casey Walker, and their two daughters in Portland, Oregon. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. (Adapated from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] moving tale that mixes the real and surreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary with impressive fluency and flair.… Ms. Walker has an instinctive feel for narrative architecture, creating a story, in lapidary prose, that moves ahead with a sense of both the inevitable and the unexpected.… Ms. Walker maps [her characters’] inner lives with such sure-footedness that they become as recognizable to us as people we’ve grown up with or watched for years on television.… [A] precocious debut…one of this summer’s hot literary reads.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
If you begin this book, you'll be loath to set it down until you've reached its end.… The Age of Miracles reminds us that we never know when everything will change, when a single event will split our understanding of personal history and all history into a Before and an After.
San Francisco Chronicle
The perfect combination of the intimate and the pandemic.… Flawlessly written; it could be the most assured debut by an American writer since Jennifer Egan's Emerald City.
Denver Post
Simply told, skillfully crafted and filled with metaphorical unities, this resonant first novel [rings] with difficult truths both large and small.
Kansas City Star
Both utterly realistic and fantastically dystopian.… The big miracles, Walker seems to be saying, may doom the world at large, but the little ones keep life worth living.
Minnesota Herald Tribune
Walker’s tone can be properly [Harper] Lee-esque; both Julia and Scout grapple with the standard childhood difficulties as their societies crumble around them. But life prevails, and the stunning Miracles subtly conveys that adapting.
Time Out New York
Part speculative fiction, part coming-of-age story.… The Age of Miracles could turn Walker into American literature's next big thing.
NPR
Walker creates lovely, low-key scenes to dramatize her premise.… The spirit of Ray Bradbury hovers in the mixture of the portentous and quotidian.
The New Yorker
(Starred review) [Walker] matches the fierce creativity of her imagination with a lyrical and portentous understanding of the present.
People
Quietly explosive.… Walker describes global shifts with a sense of utter realism, but she treats Julia’s personal adolescent upheaval with equal care, delicacy, and poignancy.
O, The Oprah Magazine
This haunting and soul-stirring novel about the apocalypse is transformative and unforgettable.
Marie Claire
(Starred review.) [G]ripping…. [F]iercely grounded in the surreal and horrifying day-to-day and the personal decisions that persist even though no one knows wha. t to do. A triumph of vision, language, and terrifying momentum.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]tunning…. Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. As readers, why do you think we’re drawn to stories about the end of the world? What special pleasures do these kinds of narratives offer? And how do you think this element works in The Age of Miracles?
2. Julia is an only child. How does this fact affect who she is and how she sees the world? How would her experience of the slowing be different if she had a sibling? How would her experience of middle school be different?
3. How much do you think the slowing alters Julia’s experience of adolescence? If the slowing had never happened, in what ways would her childhood have been different? In what ways would it have been the same?
4. Julia’s parents’ marriage becomes increasingly strained over the course of the book. Why do you think they stay together? Do you think it’s the right choice? How much do you think Julia’s mother does or does not know about Sylvia?
5. Julia’s father tells several crucial lies. Discuss these lies and consider which ones, if any, are justified and which ones are not. Is lying ever the right thing to do? If so, when?
6. How would the book change if it were narrated by Julia’s mother? What if it were narrated by Julia’s father? Or her grandfather?
7. Why do you think Julia is so drawn to Seth? Why do you think he is drawn to her?
8. Did you identify more with the clock-timers or with the real-timers? Which would you be and why?
9. The slowing affects the whole planet, but the book is set in southern California. How does the setting affect the book? How important is it that the story takes place in California?
10. How do you feel about the way the book ends? What do you think lies ahead for Julia, for her parents and for the world?
11. The slowing throws the natural world into disarray. Plants and animals die and there are changes in the weather. Did this book make you think about the threats that face our own natural world? Do you think the book has something to say about climate change?
12. If you woke up tomorrow to the news that the rotation of the earth had significantly slowed, how do you think you would respond? What is the first thing you would do?
(Questions from the author's website.)
In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner, 2012
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451657708
Summary
You are about to read an extraordinary story. It will take you to the very depths of despair and show you unspeakable horrors.
It will reveal a gorgeously rich culture struggling to survive through a furtive bow, a hidden ankle bracelet, fragments of remembered poetry. It will ensure that the world never forgets the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, when an estimated two million people lost their lives. It will give you hope, and it will confirm the power of storytelling to lift us up and help us not only survive but transcend suffering, cruelty, and loss.
For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours, bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as the Khmer Rouge attempts to strip the population of every shred of individual identity, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of her childhood— the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father.
In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author’s extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Cambodia
• Education—B.A., cornell University
• Currently—lives in Potomac, Maryland, USA
Vaddey Ratner was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. After four years, having endured forced labor, starvation, and near execution, she escaped while many of her family members perished.
In 1981, she arrived in the U.S. as a refugee not knowing English and, in 1990, went on to graduate as her high school class valedictorian. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Cornell University, where she specialized in Southeast Asian history and literature. In recent years she traveled and lived in Cambodia and Southeast Asia, writing and researching, which culminated in her debut novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan. She lives in Potomac, Maryland. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
How is it that so much of this bleak novel is full of beauty, even joy?... As a work of fiction, In the Shadow of the Banyan is less a testament to atrocity than a reconciliation with the past. At one point, Raami’s nanny tells her that stories “are like footpaths of the gods. They lead us back and forth across time and space and connect us to the entire universe.” What is remarkable, and honorable, here is the absence of anger, and the capacity—seemingly infinite—for empathy.
Ligaya Mishan - New York Times Book Review
The horrors committed by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, as experienced by one extremely resilient girl. A brutal novel, lyrically told.
O, The Oprah Magazine
(Starred review.) The struggle for survival is relayed with elegance and humility in Ratner’s autobiographical debut novel set in Khmer Rouge–era Cambodia. Raami is seven when civil war erupts, and she and her family are forced to leave Phnom Penh for the countryside. As minor royalty, they’re in danger; the Khmer Rouge is systematically cleansing the country of wealthy and educated people. Escaping their Phnom Penh home aboard a rusty military vehicle, a gold necklace is traded for rice, and literacy can mean death; “They say anyone with glasses reads too much... the sign of an intellectual.” Amid hunger, the loss of much of her family, and labor camp toil, Raami clings to the beauty that her father has shown her in traditional mythology and his own poetry. Raami’s story closely follows that of Ratner’s own: a child when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, she endured years under their rule until she and her mother escaped to the United States in 1981. This stunning memorial expresses not just the terrors of the Khmer Rouge but also the beauty of what was lost. A hauntingly powerful novel imbued with the richness of old Cambodian lore, the devastation of monumental loss, and the spirit of survival.
Publishers Weekly
Ratner's tale of what happens to seven-year-old Raami when the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia is based on personal experience, though she herself was only five at the time, eventually arriving in America as a refugee in 1981. A huge in-house favorite.
Library Journal
Her heartrending, mournful tale depicts the horrors of thekilling fields and the senselessness of the violence there while still managingto capture small, beautiful moments…By countering the stark and abject realityof her experience with lyrical descriptions of the natural beauty of Cambodiaand its people, Ratner has crafted an elegiac tribute to the Cambodia she knewand loved.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Ratner's avowedly autobiographical first novel describes her family's travails during the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s.... For four years, one terrible event follows another, with small moments of hope followed by cruelty and despair.... While names are changed (though not Ratner's father's name, which she keeps to honor his memory) and events are conflated, an author's note clarifies how little Ratner's novel has strayed from her actual memory of events. Often lyrical, sometimes a bit ponderous: a painful, personal record of Cambodia's holocaust.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1.According to the prophecy that Grandmother Queen tells Raami at the beginning of the novel, “There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan tree.” What does the prophecy mean to Raami when she first hears it? How does her belief in the prophecy change by the end of the novel? After reading, what does the title of this novel mean to you?
2.Tata tells Raami, “The problem with being seven—I remember myself at that age—is that you’re aware of so much, and yet you understand so little. So you imagine the worst.” Discuss Raami’s impressions as a seven-year-old. How much is she aware of, and how much (or little) does she understand?
3.Review the scene in which Raami tells the Kamapibal her father’s real name. How does this serve as a turning point in the novel—what changes forever after this revelation? How does it affect Raami, and her relationship with both Papa and Mama?
4.Papa tells Raami, “I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything—your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering.” How does the power of storytelling liberate Raami at different points in the novel?
5.Compare Mama’s and Papa’s styles of storytelling. When does each parent tell Raami stories, and what role do these stories serve? Which of Papa’s stories did you find most memorable? Which of Mama’s?
6.Consider Raami and her family’s Buddhist faith. How do their beliefs help them endure life under the Khmer Rouge?
7.Discuss Raami’s feelings of guilt over losing Papa and Radana. Why does she feel responsible for Papa’s decision to leave the family? For Radana’s death? How does she deal with her own guilt and grief?
8.What does Big Uncle have in common with Papa, and how do the two brothers differ? How does Big Uncle handle the responsibility of keeping his family together? What ultimately breaks his spirit?
9.Raami narrates, “my polio, time and again, had proven a blessing in disguise.” Discuss Raami’s disability, and its advantages and disadvantages during her experiences.
10.Although Raami endures so much hardship in the novel, in some ways she is a typical inquisitive child. What aspects of her character were you able to relate to?
11.Discuss how the Organization is portrayed in the novel. How does Raami picture the Organization to look, sound, and act? How do the Organization’s policies and strategies evolve over the course of the novel?
12.Names have a strong significance in the novel. Papa tells Raami he named her Vattaaraami, “Because you are my temple and my garden, my sacred ground, and in you I see all of my dreams.” What does Papa’s own name, Sisowath Ayuravann, mean? What traditions and stories are passed down through these names?
13.Consider Raami’s stay with Pok and Mae. Discuss what and how both Raami and Mama learn from them, albeit differently. Do you think their stay with Pok and Mae gave them hope?
14.“Remember who you are,” Mama tells Raami when they settle in Stung Khae. How does Raami struggle to maintain her identity as a daughter, a member of the royal family, and a Buddhist? Why does Mama later change her advice and encourage Raami to forget her identity?
15.Mama tells Raami after Radana’s death, “I live because of you—for you. I’ve chosen you over Radana.” Discuss Mama’s complicated feelings for her two daughters. Why did Raami assume that Radana was her mother’s favorite, and how does Mama’s story change Raami’s mind?
16.At the end of the novel, Raami realizes something new about her father’s decision to give himself up to the Kamapibal: “I’d mistaken his words and deeds, his letting go, for detachment, when in fact he was seeking rebirth, his own continuation in the possibility of my survival.” Discuss Papa’s “words and deeds” before he leaves the family. Why did Raami mistake his intentions, and how does she come to realize the truth about him?
17.How much did you know about the Khmer Rouge before reading In the Shadow of the Banyan? What did you learn?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Shine Shine Shine
Lydia Netzer, 2012
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250007070
Summary
When Maxon met Sunny, he was seven years, four months, and eighteen-days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together.
Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be “normal.” She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in each other: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son. And Sunny is pregnant again. And her mother is dying in the hospital. Their marriage is on the brink of imploding, and they’re at each other’s throats with blame and fear. What exactly has gone wrong?
Sunny wishes Maxon would turn the rocket around and come straight-the-hell home.
When an accident in space puts the mission in peril, everything Sunny and Maxon have built hangs in the balance. Dark secrets, long-forgotten murders, and a blond wig all come tumbling to the light. And nothing will ever be the same.…
A debut of singular power and intelligence, Shine Shine Shine is a unique love story, an adventure between worlds, and a stunning novel of love, death, and what it means to be human. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A. Bowling Green State University
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, Virginia
In her words:
I was born in Detroit and raised by two public school teachers. We lived in Michigan during the school year, and at an old farm in the hills of western Pennsylvania during school vacations. My world revolved around horses, music, and books. I went to college and grad school in the midwest, met my husband and got married in Chicago, and then moved to Norfolk when we decided to have kids. We have two: a boy and a girl. I homeschool them and taxi them to orchestra rehearsal, the karate dojo, the pony farm, and many music lessons. At our homeschool co-op I teach literature, and I love to travel, knit, play my electric guitar, and of course read. (From the author's website.)
Shine, Shine, Shine is Lydia's first book; her second is How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (2014).
Book Reviews
Over the moon with a metaphysical spin. Heart-tugging…it is struggling to understand the physical realities of life and the nature of what makes us human….Nicely unpredictable…Extraordinary.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
There are certain novels that are just twisty, delightfully so. Shine, Shine, Shine is one. In this first novel, Lydia Netzer takes a hard look at being completely human through the eyes of two people who are kinda not…Shine, Shine, Shine may ask an old question. But Netzer’s answer to how to be who you are is fresh from the heart.
New York Daily News
The novel traces Maxon and Sunny’s relationship from their childhoods in Burma and Appalachia to outer space, revealing the futility of chasing an ideal of what’s normal…Shine Shine Shine breaks free of the gravitational pull of traditional romantic cliches.
Washington Post
Lydia Netzer’s luminous debut novel concerns what lies beneath society’s pretty surfaces—Sunny’s congenital hairlessness, her husband’s remoteness, their son’s autism. What makes it unexpectedly moving is how skillfully Netzer then peels back those layers, finding heartbreaking depth even in characters who lack ordinary social skills.
Boston Globe
This is a novel about the strangeness of being human. Lydia Netzer says she wrote it when she was pregnant with her first child and feeling "paralysed with fear that I was too weird, too self-absorbed, too unskilled to have a child, and that whatever baby had the bad luck to be born of my uterus would be permanently scarred by my failings." Hopefully, she feels better now. Or at least, a lot less alone in her imagined weirdness. After meeting Sunny and Maxon, I know I do.
Independent (UK)
Netzer has penned a modern take on alienation, building a family, making connections—creating memorable characters and an odd, idiosyncratic, but highly believable narrative along the way.
Toronto Star
[Sunny and Maxon’s] peculiarities form an endearing story in Shine Shine Shine, Norfolk resident Lydia Netzer's first—and amazingly inventive—novel.... Netzer's munificence of spirit lights her story with compassion.... Shine Shine Shine transcends not only geography, whether in Burma, Pennsylvania, Norfolk or outer space, but also the science and the struggles, the weirdness and the woe; it aims straight for the heart and the humanity that unites us all. Netzer, whose imagination knows no limits, infuses her debut with love—and reminds us that normalcy can be vastly overrated.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Shine, Shine, Shine is a novel…but “Shine, Shine, Shine” could easily refer to Netzer’s writing abilities, the way she handles the craft of storytelling, and the way her novel captures and holds the reader’s attention…Netzer is a master storyteller. She leads the reader through a landscape full of beauty and charged with pitfalls, actual and emotional, while holding your eyes to the page, and your fingers itching to turn to the next page
Virginian Pilot
Not only entertaining, but nuanced and wise…blending wit and imagination with an oddly mesmerizing, matter-of-fact cadence, Netzer’s debut is a delightfully unique love story and a resounding paean to individuality.
People (A People Pick)
From a distance, Netzer’s confident debut is the tale of “an astronaut lost in space, and the wife he left behind.” At its core, it is the story of the power of love to overcome the great accidents of the universe. Sunny was born totally hairless. Her husband, Maxon, is a rocket scientist, and together they have an autistic son named Bubber. It appears they live a normal suburban life in Virginia— Sunny wears a long blond wig and Bubber is medicated to keep him calm. But after Maxon leaves for a space expedition, a car accident reveals Sunny’s hairlessness to her friends and neighbors. Being outed causes Sunny to re-examine her life, and she begins to come to terms with herself as different but special. Meanwhile, Maxon’s expedition is jeopardized when a tiny rock “that had been hiding behind the moon” slams into his spaceship. As he and his crew struggle to survive, and Sunny embraces her family’s peculiarities, Netzer deftly illuminates the bonds that transcend shortcomings and tragedy. Characterized by finely textured emotions and dramatic storytelling, Netzer’s world will draw readers happily into its orbit.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Sunny is the perfect wife leading the perfect life in small-town Virginia, with a husband she's managed to make look pretty standard-issue, too, though he's a brainy-to-distraction astronaut slated to help colonize the moon. Then a minor car crash sends Sunny's blonde wig flying, revealing that she's bald, and the normalcy these two have built up since meeting as oddball children starts to tumble. Lots of in-house enthusiasm for what seems to be a juicily wacky and engaging first novel.
Library Journal
Netzer's debut, about a heavily pregnant woman left to care for her dying mother and autistic son while her Nobel-winning husband travels to the moon, takes the literary concept of charmingly quirky characters to a new level.... While [Maxon] faces a crisis in space that shows him how much his relationships on earth matter, Sunny stops wearing her wig, medicating Bubber to control him and maintaining Emma endlessly on life support. She drops her pretense of normality, only to realize that there may be no such thing as normal; everyone wears a metaphorical wig. Talky uplift and a self-congratulatory tone bog down the novel, but through compelling characters, Netzer raises a provocative question: Is autism a disability, a gift or the norm of the future?
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Is Emma a good mother?
2. What might Sunny's life have been like if she had never gotten pregnant, and therefore never felt the need to put on the wig?
3. Was Sunny culpable for Paul Mann's death?
4. Do you agree with Rache that everyone has their baldness, or do you think those perfect housewives actually exist?
5. Perhaps Maxon was better off without his dad, but do you think Sunny was negatively affected by growing up without a father?
6. If you wrote a letter to your child, to be read only after your death, what would it say?
7. The book suggests that raising any child is like programming a robot, with scripted replies, ritual behaviors, and reinforced responses. Do you agree?
8. Emma did not want Sunny to marry Maxon. Why? And was she right?
9. Do you think that Sunny seriously considered Les Weathers as a replacement for Maxon, if he should die?
10. Where would you prefer to live: the perfect house in a respectable neighborhood in a historic city, or a strange farmhouse in the wilds of an eccentric rural county?
11. What changes have you made to fit in to a new role you've taken on, whether it's parenthood, a new job, or a marriage?
12. Do you think that motherhood fundamentally changes a woman, or do you think it's possible to hold on to the person you were before kids?
13. Why did Emma bring Sunny back to America?
14. How is Maxon flawed as a husband? How is he a good spouse?
15. Could there be someone better for Maxon than Sunny?
16. In her worry that marrying Maxon would ruin Sunny, should Emma have wonder if marrying Sunny would be the best thing for him?
17. Is it Maxon's fault that Bubber is the way he is?
18. Did Sunny make the right decision in taking Bubber out of his special school and off his medications?
19. How does a woman's relationship with her mother change when she becomes a mother herself?
20. Sunny felt she had to let her mother's ship fall past the horizon before her own could set sail. Can a woman truly become "the mother" while her own mother is alive?
21. Although Sunny's mother Emma was the epitome of acceptance, and encouraged her to go without a wig while she was growing up, why do you think Sunny started wearing them?
22. Why did Emma turn her husband in to the communists when they lived in Burma, and was this revelation necessary for the plot and coherence of the book?
23. In pages 291-293 of the book, during Sunny's labor with Bubber, she at first thinks she overhears her mother and Maxon having a conversation about Maxon going to the moon, but later Sunny thinks she must have made up the conversation. Do you think this conversation did occur? Why or why not? If you think it did occur what do you think motivated Sunny's mother to make the suggestion to Maxon that he complete his mission to the moon?
24. How is Sunny's decision to abandon her wig after her car accident related to her decision to take Bubber off of his medication?
Diary of an Ordinary Woman
Margaret Forster, 2003
Random House UK
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780099449287
Summary
Millicent King is an "ordinary" woman living through extraordinary times in this brilliantly conceived piece of fictional memoir writing.
Diary of an Ordinary Woman is the edited diary of fictional woman Millicent King (1901-1995). From the age of 13, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books. The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English family touched by war, tragedy and money troubles in the early decades of the century. With vividness, she records her brother's injury, her father's death from pneumonia, the family's bankruptcy, giving up college to take a soul-destroying job as a shop assistant.
Millicent struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From Bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, her story moves on to social work, the General Strike, the Depression Era of the 1930's and the build-up to the Second World-War in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. This is followed by her experience of the Swinging Sixties and Maggie Thatcher's Britain.
She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism, but her life is turned upside down by wartime deaths. Here is 20th-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives. Her ordinary life proves unexpectedly absorbing and, at times, extremely moving showing that, above all, the most ordinary lives are often extraordinary. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 25, 1938
• Where—Carlisle, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London and the Lake District, England
Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle, England, in 1938 and educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. From here she won an open scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford where she was awarded an honours degree in History. After her exams she married the writer Hunter Davies, whom she met and fell in love with at the age of 17.
She became a schoolteacher in Islington, North London (between 1961-63) briefly before embarking on a writing career. She first achieved fame in 1965 with her second book, Georgy Girl which was made into a film starring Lynn Redgrave and Michael Caine. Since 1963, Margaret Forster has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to radio 4 and various newspapers and magazines. She was a member of the BBC Advisory Committee on the Social Effects of Television from 1975-77 and of the Arts Council Literary Panel from 1978-81, as well as the chief non-fiction reviewer for the London Evening Standard from 1977-80.
She is the author of the bestselling memoirs, Hidden Lives (a memoir of her own family) and Precious Lives. Her acclaimed biographies include the biography of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Among Forster's many successful novels are Lady's Maid, Private Papers, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, and The Memory Box.
She and her husband, the writer Hunter Davies, have three children. The couple lives half the year in London and half the year at their cottage in the Lake District. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A highly enjoyable read: well-informed, gripping...an overview of the period seen from the underside
Sunday Telegraph
Not only is the background of social and political change meticulously accurate...but there is everything one would expect from a well-kept diary. This is fiction: yet it is true
Guardian
A beautifully crafted novel about the cost of war... Forster is as distinguished a biographer and memoir - writer as she is a novelist. She is an old hand at making a story out of the fragments of a life
Daily Telegraph
We believe in Millicent whole-heartedly and come to love her - she has a heroism that George Eliot would recognise. It may be fiction, but it's also - convincingly, tragically and often exhilaratingly - real life
Independent on Sunday
A richly textured, skilfully structured and highly enjoyable novel by an experienced writer at the peak of her powers
Times Literary Supplement
Discussion Questions
1. "I'm always writing about family relationships, what family means and the way duty and love are all mixed up."
Forster's novels often reveal the theme that love within the family becomes blurred with a sense of duty for her female characters. Discuss the idea that family pressures put a sense of obligation upon Millicent's life and that her life is restricted by her sex and the period in which she grows up (and the limitations upon women in this period).
2. A 98-year-old woman contacted Margaret Forster to propose that Forster edit her diaries for publication. She had kept a continuous record of her life from 1914-1995. Margaret Forster never did meet the woman in question, she cancelled their meeting because of family objections. Forster decided to pretend she had obtained and read the diaries. The result is a fictionalised memoir. How authentic do you find Forster's diary in light of the fact it is a "fictionalised memoir"? You may wish to look at the diary in terms of both the private life of Millicent (ie her fears, worries, joys and insecurities — do these seem real?) and the public life beyond her world. Does the social, political and historical background of change within the novel seem realistic?
3. After the first few diary entries, Margaret Forster describes Millicent as "outspoken, quite selfish, restless, ambitious and inclined to self-pity." How much does Millicent's personality change throughout the years? Do events and circumstances change her character? Discuss Millicent's personality and how it develops from her earliest diary entries and life as a young girl, right up until her last entries as an old woman.
4. Discuss the difference between Millicent and other women of her time. Do you see her as a modern woman with both her career and her views on pre-marital sex? You may wish to compare and contrast her with other women in her diary, perhaps above all with her sister, Tilda. How do their views differ?
5. Discuss the diary method as a form of narrative structure. Does it provide us with the necessary elements to create an interesting and absorbing story? What is your view of Margaret Forster's authorial interventions between the entries? Are these necessary to give us another viewpoint and voice aside from Millicent's own? What do these add to the novel?
6. "There was nothing ordinary about this woman. Indeed, I now wonder if there is any such thing as an ordinary life at all."—Introduction to Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Margaret Forster .... Forster's work cast light upon depths of difficulties of apparently ordinary lives. Discuss how Millicent's life is both ordinary (in that she goes through many of the same experiences of other women living in the war years) and extraordinary. Is Millicent herself extraordinary, or is it simply that the events she lives through make her so?
(Questions issued by publisher.)